2010-01-15

Movie Summary

A basic guide to creating World of Warcraft movies on a mac. Only native Mac applications were used - WoW's in-built movie recorder, iMovie 09, and Quicktime (non-pro). Optional downloads you should probably get are X264 encoder (codec used to encode), and handbrake (which was only used to change the format of the WCM into to a file readable by iMovie 09).

Specs of my iMac for reference : late 2009 27" model, 3.06ghz Core2Duo, ATI Radeon 4850 (512mb), 8gb RAM. Game was running at native resolution on Ultra settings with 1x AF (2560x1440 resolution) at around 60-150 FPS, but when you record it sets the FPS to the FPS of the recording, which is why it's only about 30.

If you play at that resolution, just record at 1280x720 which is the native resolution of HD720p (Youtube's HD resolution) to make uploading easier. The client does all the resizing so no issues.

If downloading: the file should play in Quicktime, but I recommend getting VLC if you don't have it.

Oh and ignore where it says 2550x1440, its 2560x1440 :)

Hope people find this somewhat useful.

YouTube stream seems a bit quicker to load than WCM stream, and for some reason Vimeo stream won't play, but does play if you follow the link.

Feedback is welcome, but I'm not going to be making any more movies for a while until Cataclysm comes out.

It's just a basic guide, but I hope people find this helpful. Have a mess around with the various settings in the codec and recorder to get desired quality.

Also, feedback on how this video plays on various resolution/size monitors would be very useful to me .